When inefficiency becomes the real luxury
Posted on: 11 December 2025
In 2025, three hundred American bank branches closed in the first quarter alone. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan: the giants are dismantling their physical presence at a pace that, according to some projections, will lead to the disappearance of the last branch by 2041.
The official narrative is simple: digital transformation, operational efficiency, customer preferences. All true. But there's a more interesting mechanism operating beneath the surface. It concerns who you are in the system.
The threshold paradox
TD Bank has declared a precise objective: push "digital self-service" above 90%. Translation: nine out of ten customers will never speak to a human being. But look at what happens at the other end of the spectrum.
To access a dedicated J.P. Morgan adviser, you need at least $250,000 in invested assets. For Fidelity Private Wealth, the threshold rises to $2 million, plus $10 million in total assets. Goldman Sachs sold its entire retail division to focus exclusively on ultra-high-net-worth clients. Citi Private Bank maintains a ratio of one banker for every twenty clients.
Knightsbridge Circle, one of the world's most exclusive concierge services, accepts a maximum of fifty members per region. Each manager serves four or five people. Not forty. Not four hundred. Four.
The system is splitting into two layers with opposite logics.
Gresham's law applied to relationships
There's a sixteenth-century economic principle that explains what's happening: bad money drives out good. When two currencies circulate together, the one of lesser value gets used for transactions while the valuable one gets hoarded.
Apply this mechanism to human attention.
Artificial intelligence and automation have made interaction instant, free, infinitely scalable. Any company can respond to millions of customers simultaneously, personalise messages, handle requests. The marginal cost of an automated interaction tends towards zero.
And when something costs zero, its perceived value collapses.
Authentic human interaction, the kind that requires time, competence, physical presence, exclusive attention, hasn't disappeared. It has migrated. It has become the "good money" that circulates only in certain environments, whilst the "bad money" of automation handles everything else.
The signal in the noise
The data tells a precise story. The global market for luxury concierge services was worth $643 billion in 2024. It will reach $1,482 billion by 2033. It's growing at 8.7% annually whilst bank branches close.
This isn't a contradiction. It's the same phenomenon seen from two angles.
In the mass segment, friction is a defect to eliminate. The goal is invisibility: payments that require no gestures, purchases that complete without thought, services that anticipate needs before you even express them. The ideal user doesn't even notice they're interacting with a system.
In the high segment, friction has become a feature. Making an appointment, waiting for a personalised response, receiving something that cannot be instantly replicated for anyone else: all of this communicates something. It doesn't say "I'm inefficient". It says "I have sufficient resources not to need to optimise every second".
The underlying mechanism
This isn't snobbery. It's market mechanics.
When efficiency becomes ubiquitous, its marginal value plummets. Not because it's less useful, but because it no longer distinguishes. Having access to an artificial intelligence that responds in milliseconds puts you in exactly the same position as another two billion people.
Direct access to dedicated human expertise, however, is structurally limited. It cannot scale. Every hour a senior adviser spends with you is an hour they don't spend with someone else. This intrinsic scarcity makes it a reliable signal in a world saturated with falsifiable signals.
If your bank responds to you in three milliseconds, you're a number in a database optimised to reduce service costs. If it makes you wait to speak with a partner who knows your name, you're something else.
Implications for those who design systems (like me)
I've observed this mechanism since managing technology transitions in the nineties. The pattern repeats: every time a technology democratises access to something, value migrates towards what that technology cannot replicate.
The internet democratised information. Value migrated towards curation, judgement, synthesis. Social media democratised distribution. Value migrated towards authentic attention, relationships that cannot be bought with algorithms.
Now artificial intelligence is democratising personalised interaction. Value will migrate, is already migrating, towards attention that by definition cannot be automated.
If you're building a business, a career, a system of relationships, the question to ask isn't how to automate more. It's: what can you offer that will become more valuable as automation spreads?
The empirical test
Like any self-respecting analysis, this one must be falsifiable. If the mechanism I'm describing is real, we should observe certain phenomena in the coming years.
The wealth thresholds for accessing dedicated human services will continue to rise. The gap between customer experience in the mass segment and the high segment will widen, not narrow. Services that emphasise exclusive human interaction will grow more rapidly than those competing on efficiency.
If instead we see convergence, with premium services automating, affluent clients preferring chatbots, access thresholds falling, then this analysis is wrong.
The data so far points in the first direction. But past patterns don't guarantee the future. Let's observe.
A final note
I'm not suggesting you abandon efficiency or add artificial friction to your processes. I'm observing that the system is stratifying according to a precise logic, and that understanding this logic allows you to position yourself more intelligently.
The real luxury today isn't speed. It's attention that cannot be scaled. Whilst the world races towards the instant and the automatic, those who control scarce resources are moving in the opposite direction.
Not for romanticism. For calculation.